Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/points-are-a-weird-and-inconsistent-unit-of/

by danborn26 • 2 months ago

85 101 2 months ago

dsevil• 2 months ago

Just posted the following poorly-fleshed-out comment there:

So disappointed that this document, as much as it obsesses over obscure physical quantities no one cares about, makes no mention of THE FUCK.

1 fuck is equal to the amount of concern you have about something below which you cannot achieve without having no concern at all, as which giving "zero fucks" is defined. "Absolute zero fucks" would be the formal terminology.

For preliminary purposes, we can assume 1 fuck = 1 shit = 1 damn, but must account for the possible existence of a big-point-vs-printers-point style situation. Also they could be drastically different, like if 1 shit given about global warming would be equivalent to 299_792_458 fucks or something like that.

I have very little knowledge about the *real* machinations behind the standardization of measures (a tinfoil conspiracy kook would call it an Agenda 21, or 21 Agendas One, but I'm not going there), I want this to be discussed.

WillAdams4• 2 months ago

TLDR; folks should just use PostScript (Big) Points.

The mention of

https://frinklang.org/

is kind of interesting --- hadn't heard of it before --- may need to revisit the "ProportionBar" tool which I made ages ago....

JoshTriplett• 2 months ago

TLDR; folks should just use PostScript (Big) Points.

The distinction ends up being important if you need compatibility with some document format, or with common typesetting expectations. But if there weren't a concern of surprising people with certain expectations of font-picking widgets, I'd argue that the better choice would be millimeters.

4mm is a great default font size, and going up by one integer mm at a time is a reasonable step size (it's just under 3pt).

WillAdams4• 2 months ago

In Japan, a common measurement of font size is _kyu_ (q) one-fourth of a millimeter (0.25mm).

PopAlongKid• 2 months ago

From the title I thought this was going to be about basis points, as used in finance. (A basis point is one hundredth of 1 percentage point).

RexM• 2 months ago

I thought it was going to be about story points.

sevenseacat• 2 months ago

I thought it was going to be about story points and I was going to wholeheartedly agree with the premise

NooneAtAll3• 2 months ago

what do story points measure?

zetanor• 2 months ago

That's why my favorite unit is the px, a.k.a., 1 centiinch.

JimDabell• 2 months ago

CSS pixels are weirder:

http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx

fluidcruft• 2 months ago

I thought px was an abbreviation of pixel which doesn't have a dimension?

Tagbert2• 2 months ago

Pixels have pitch, which is the distance between pixels. That is what is usually meant when talking about px as a measurement. It is analogous to dpi or ppi or the metric version.

endofreach• 2 months ago

I don't know what happened in my brain but i expected a piece about points as in keeping scores. Maybe about how we evolved from binary results (alive/dead in early human competitions) to more complex systems. I'd say humans played games long before being able to count. Of course competition is inherent to human nature. But i'd say, without getting into any philosophical debate, a certain amount of compassion and empathy is as well. Which must have resulted in early ideas of fairness. Especially when respect and status seem to be crucial to society.

So, how and when did points come into play? ...

Well, ok. I stop procrastinating for now (i hope). I hate my brain.

butvacuum• 2 months ago

Not sure, but typefacing/fonts is absolutely cursed with this stuff. I'd be shocked if there isn't a true type font that runs DOOM. There's a reason Microsoft pushed font rendering out of the kernel in Vista. (Technically, they started the work on it)

cheschire• 2 months ago

EMUs always seemed weirder to me. Like an unnecessary compromise instead of just using metric outright.

https://startbigthinksmall.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/points-i...

snoopen• 2 months ago

Oh they're a super weird unit for sure. But I do kinda like that it allows expressing both 100ths of an inch and 10ths of a millimetre as an integer. I wonder if they're a carryover from early versions of MS Word when CPU power was more limited?

tariky• 2 months ago

As someone from european continent. Those US measurements units look and feel so hard to work with.

Instead metric system is predictable and easy to work with.

Real question is why US just don't move to metric system?

reddalo• 2 months ago

why US just don't move to metric system?

They've been trying for a long time, but apparently it's not an easy task.

georgemcbay• 2 months ago

Real question is why US just don't move to metric system?

Because we live in a land of liberty!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk

cityofdelusion• 2 months ago

The U.S. uses metric pretty much everywhere that is important, in most science, engineering, and medicine. Specific trades and common household things remain imperial due to inertia and no one really caring. It is much more accurate to say the U.S. has a dual system. We learn metric in school like everyone else.

Jblx23• 2 months ago

Can't wait for us to adopt the metric Avogadro constant. I wonder what units they use for the Hubble constant in Europe (love me some megaparsecs).

iacelmiv• 2 months ago

Points are not American, they are used for typography in Europe and everywhere else equally as much as in the US.

The metric system is poorly suited for font sizes. Most designs require a series of sizes within a small range: a typical book or poster might use 9pt for footnotes, 12pt for main text, 16pt for subtitles, and 24pt for titles.

Aesthetically speaking the most attractive ratios of sizes are small ratios like 3:2 and 4:3. Using points it is very easy to construct an attractive range of font sizes like my example above. It is difficult to imagine how this would look in a metric system that's not a mess.

perilunar4• 2 months ago

Font sizes would be perfectly fine in millimetres. 9 pt ≅ 3 mm, 12 pt ≅ 4 mm, 18 pt ≅ 6 mm, 24 pt ≅ 8 mm. The difference is about 6%.

analog314• 2 months ago

In industry, we have. At home, most households have little or no use for US dimension tools such as wrenches. You can service a bike with all metric tools.

"Going metric" raises the question of whether we adopt metric measures for our existing standards (such as pipe threads) or actually adopt the ISO sizes. The latter would cause a brief but massive inventory management problem, that nobody's ever willing to put up with, even if there's a long term benefit.

I believe we made a mistake in how we tried to teach the metric system. I learned in first grade: Metric is easy because it's just math. Most people heard "math" and freaked out. Metric was taught as a bunch of conversions and units. Inches were taught as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.

I remember talking to a machinist, and he said: "I hate the metric system because there's so much math." That was 30+ years ago. Today, machinists just read mm or inches from the same digital readout or CAD program.

My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.

perilunar4• 2 months ago

"Going metric" raises the question of whether we adopt metric measures for our existing standards (such as pipe threads) or actually adopt the ISO sizes.

You adopt ISO sizes FFS. They are international standards. You really want to invent a whole new set of incompatible 'standards'?

You think the US is the first to go through this? Australia, Canada, and the UK went metric in the 1970s (we also decimalised our currencies). Yes it was challenging for some adults but mostly pretty easy for kids. People adapted. Industries adapted. Now we hardly think about it except when dealing with Americans or in some historical contexts.

SoftTalker6• 2 months ago

Imperial measurements do have the benefit of more even divisors than metric.

Pretty common to talk about measurements of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 of an inch and find those graduated on a ruler. Or 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/8 of a cup for liquid measures, etc.

But then machinists generally work in thousandth or ten-thousandths of an inch.

dguest2• 2 months ago

I'm fine with math, but that doesn't make it less annoying.

The real advantage of metric is that you only have to do math once to calculate something. A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg. It's just easy. A deep lake over a few square km? O(1) GT. Understanding orders of magnitude is a useful trait in a democracy.

You hit the nail on the head here though:

My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.

Like any language, as long as you're translating you're loosing. Post signs in km and report temperature as C and everyone will understand it in less than a decade. A few years after I had a metric thermometer in my car C seemed easy.

It's not like the US failed to think of this. In the 80s they were posting signs in km. But back then there was a real economic cost to conversion for factories and machines. Now that's mostly gone, what remains is cultural resistance.

projektfu4• 2 months ago

My countrymen are shockingly dumb. Presented with something rational like 24-hour time, they prefer to not learn and be confused all the time instead of adopting the better way. Unless it's mandatory, such as in military or aviation, then they are happy with it and feel like part of a special in-group.

Jblx23• 2 months ago

something rational like 24-hour time

Shouldn't the real smarties be using 10-hour days using metric time? 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute.

https://timeity.com/metric-time/

drstewart• 2 months ago

Reddit level post.

If Europeans are so smart, why didn't they commit to metric time which is soon much easier to understand?

pessimizer• 2 months ago

French people did metric, meanwhile they prefer "four-twenty and fourteen" to "ninety-four."

dataflow• 2 months ago

My countrymen are shockingly dumb. Presented with something rational like 24-hour time

24-hour time is terrible. An analog clock doesn't have that written on it...

LtWorf• 2 months ago

Real question is why US just don't move to metric system?

The maga people are ready to die on this hill.

AngryData2• 2 months ago

Because you have to ask what benefit will it serve in exchange for the effort? In places werwere it really matter we already do, and conversions are pretty simple otherwise. Sometimes fractional units are just slightly easier for a specific task, and having used them our whole lives they are second nature.

To me asking why we don't have a single measuring standard is similiar to asking why we don't all agree on a single language. Sometimes it would be easier, sometimes it wouldn't, but in the end it doesn't matter all that much.

CyLith2• 2 months ago

Because I don't want to deal with a hundred of anything, and I don't want to deal with decimal points. I want everything I measure to be near single digit numbers. Hence, inches for common dimensions like a "2x4". I can handle something being 5 1/4 inches. How the hell large is 133 mm? Humans are not good at intuiting numbers far from unity.

Miles are great. The typical highway speed limit is about a mile a minute. You can easily lower bound how long it will take to get somewhere if you know how far it is in miles.

In cooking, I often need to halve quantities in recipes, hence pounds and ounces. Watching cooking channels give metric quantities is absolutely baffling to me. You see things like 175 mL. That is 2 sigfigs too many.

nonfamous• 2 months ago

> That is 2 sigfigs too many

Don’t take up baking then, where the difference between 175 mLs of water and 200 mLs of water can be the difference between unworkable dough and the perfect pie crust.

mahkeiro2• 2 months ago

You don't want to manage a decimal point but you are fine adding two set of units? Like in 6'3?

wodenokoto• 2 months ago

How the hell large is 133 mm?

1 1/3 decimeter, perhaps?

agus4nas• 2 months ago

taht`s perfect 4 europeans

masfuerte• 2 months ago

FWIW, early 1980s Epson dot-matrix printers vertically spaced the dots in the print head exactly 1/72" apart, though I don't remember them calling the distance a point.

efitz• 2 months ago

Well that there is your problem, LaTeX is using imperial points, and Inkscape is using metric points.

You need to start using SI points that are defined using wavelengths of ground state emissions of a decaying Americium atom.

djoldman• 2 months ago

Not to support or attack the rationale behind the css or html standards but these have exact real world SI unit meanings:

   CSS  |                    | Exact Size | Exact Size    
   Unit | Name               | (Inches)   | (Millimeters) 
  --------------------------------------------------------
   cm   | Centimeter         | 50/127     | 10            
   mm   | Millimeter         | 5/127      | 1             
   Q    | Quarter-millimeter | 5/508      | 1/4           
   in   | Inch               | 1          | 127/5         
   pc   | Pica               | 1/6        | 127/30        
   pt   | Point              | 1/72       | 127/360       
   px   | Pixel              | 1/96       | 127/480

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millimetre

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-3/#absolute-lengths

dylan6043• 2 months ago

Never heard of the Quarter-millimeter before. Strange mix of divisions by tens suddenly switching to divisions of twos

WillAdams4• 2 months ago

It's known as the _kyu_ in Japan and used for specifying type (font) sizes.

stevesimmons• 2 months ago

I'd never heard of it either. A comment further down suggests it is Japanese.

Digging deeper, the kyu -- or Q for quarter millimeter -- is apparently a foundational distance measurement in Japanese typesetting, which is metric and operates on a millimeter grid.

m463• 2 months ago

When the mcdonalds quarter pounder with cheese came out, the europeans came out with this government sponsored measurement for fast food chains to standardize and compete without adopting american standards. (like usb-c over lightning)

;)

My_Name• 2 months ago

Here was me thinking it was about getting points on HN

ivolimmen• 2 months ago

This is why Microsoft access had twips

Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure

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